Event overview

This talk presents an ongoing project with Gregory Garretson to create the Clinton Email Corpus, using the 33,000 recently released emails sent to and from Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. I will first introduce the corpus itself, explaining the origin of the data, the goals for the final corpus, and the technical challenges that arise in its compilation. I will then present the results of a study on a 500-email subset of the data, which looks at the messages from several perspectives: gender of sender and recipient, role within the organisation, and membership of Clinton's inner circle. Using a bigram analysis as the starting point, we find informative differences among the content and function of the messages, but no clear changes in their tone. Indeed, Clinton herself appears to refrain from overt displays of power, at least as measured by her language choices.